Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The US Supreme Court has taken up the
issue of so-called ObamaCare: the controversial plan to extend
private health insurance to all citizens, with a stiff tax penalty
for those who refuse to purchase private health insurance. I know
something about it, since I live in Massachusetts, a state that
adopted so-called RomneyCare, after Mitt Romney, who was our governor
at the time, and is now running for president. ObamaCare is modeled
on RomneyCare.

The Supreme Court wasted a day
discussing whether the tax penalty is a tax or a penalty, a
distinction that's relevant only in the context of some arcane law
concerning the litigation of unjust taxes, but lost on everyone,
because the penalty shows up on one's tax bill. This point was
discussed ad nauseam, so I will not discuss it or any of the other
issues relating to ObamaCare that everyone banters about endlessly.
Instead, I will say what no-one is saying: Obamacare (and Romneycare)
invalidates the notion of health insurance.

First, let's make sure that we are all clear on the concept of
insurance. Insurance is generally taken to mean a promise to pay out
a settlement (or coverage) in case of a certain event (fire, flood,
sickness), in exchange for a recurring cost (premium) and, usually, a
deductible (or self-insurance). Insurers weigh the risk of the event against the amount
of the settlement. Thus, if the policy is against your spontaneous
combustion, with a risk estimated as 1 chance in a billion per year,
and you want to insure yourself for $1 billion, then your
premium is $1 per year, plus whatever the insurance company wants to
charge you for writing the policy. If, however, you are currently
engulfed in flames, then the risk goes up to 100% and the premium
would theoretically be $1 billion, same as the settlement, but no
insurance company would ever write such a policy because the risk is
too high.

Now, health insurance is a strange
proposition to start with, because everyone dies, and nobody dies
healthy, so most people require medical treatment at some point. (A few people spontaneously combust, I suppose. They are still none too healthy during the few seconds before they die, but that's not
long enough for them to avail themselves of medical attention. But
that's a very rare case.) The point is, if all houses burned down at some point,
there would be no fire insurance, and if all houses flooded at some point, there
would be no flood insurance. But everyone dies, and yet there is
health insurance. How is that?

ObamaCare introduces the provision that
health insurers are not allowed to decline insurance coverage to
individuals with pre-existing health conditions. That is equivalent
to mandating fire insurance for houses engulfed in flames, or flood
insurance for houses slowly sinking while floating downstream. In
return, insurance companies are assured that they will be able to
spread the risk over the entire population, which will be coerced to
purchase their product by being threatened with a stiff tax
penalty.

Some coercion is certainly required for
people to accept such a faulty product. My family's health insurance
bill comes to nearly $15,000 a year, with a $2,500 a year deductible.
That is, we have to consume more than $2,500 a year in health care
before the insurance pays anything. If I am employed, then the
employer has to pay 80% of the premium; if I become unemployed
through no fault of my own, then the state picks up the 80% for a few months; after that, I have the option of paying even more for
an individual insurance plan, or paying somewhat less for the tax penalty but then risk
being bankrupted by a medical emergency.

Recently, I called my insurer to ask
how much a certain elective procedure might cost. You see, under this
system, the doctor bills the insurer, the ensurer “adjusts” the
amount, and then I pay the adjusted amount. I wanted to know the
adjusted price beforehand, but I was told that they do not give out this
information. The adjustments are generated by an inscrutable computer
program, which determines the numbers on the spur of the moment based
on a set of formulas. Now, normally I don't do business with
companies that refuse to quote a price before I place the order.
That's where the tax penalty is most helpful to them: it leaves me no choice
but do business with, and get robbed by, this company.

As Vladimir Nabokov once pointed out,
nothing breaks the human spirit more effectively than consistent bad
treatment. To this end, forcing everyone to navigate an infuriating
bureaucratic maze with their very health held at ransom is quite an
effective strategy. Another is to force everyone to abide a blatant
falsehood, such as calling health insurance “insurance” (now
preferring, I notice, the more abstract word “coverage”) whereas
it is definitely not insurance at all but a tax. Yet another is to
force people to make false choices, such as between Romney, author of
RomneyCare, and Obama, author of ObamaCare, which are very similar. At this point, the
American spirit seems very well broken, along with the economy and
the political system, and I do not advise you to squander your
precious energies in trying to fix the latter two. I do, however, recommend that you mend your spirit, and stop thinking it necessary to abide a falsehood: health insurance is not
insurance.

What is it then? “Insurance” that
everybody is forced to buy as a legal precondition of citizenship? Where the risk pool includes the
entire country? Where compliance is enforced by a federal agency, the
Internal Revenue Service? (But where, if one does comply, the money
goes to private entities, to pay other private entities.) What is
that? Why, of course, it's a private tax collection service!
Under ObamaCare, medical insurance companies become private tax
collectors. Now, private tax collectors are not unprecedented in the
annals of empire. The Roman senate bid tax collection contracts out to publicans, with mixed results: farmers often opted to abandon their land rather than farm it and have the grain confiscated to pay
taxes. But ObamaCare takes private tax collection one step further:
under it, the tax collectors not only collect the taxes, but also set
the level of taxation as they see fit. That is, the medical “insurance” companies
are allowed determine the “health tax.”

What makes this complex scheme of
private tax collection so necessary? Its benefits include maximizing
health industry profits, which can be recycled as electoral campaign
contributions to elected officials who then protect the prerogatives of
the health industry, keeping this private tax collection scheme
running smoothly. But none of these benefits have much to do with
keeping the population healthy. On the other hand, it creates a
massive perverse incentive to maximize health care costs, while at the
same time institutionalizing a private system of public robbery.

I therefore propose that the health tax be collected

directly by the Internal Revenue Service.

Furthermore, in absence of any
competent agency within the US that could be charged with
administering a public health care system, I propose that health care
be directly funded by the Internal Revenue Service as well, as part
of an integrated strategy for maximizing tax revenue: the “Keep
American Taxpayer Healthy” plan.

The unambiguous mandate of the IRS is to maximize
tax revenues. This it will do by making sure that taxpayers are
healthy, so that they can earn the maximum of income and pay the
maximum of income tax. It will make it a priority to provide good
health care to all children, who are IRS's “seed stock”—the
taxpayers of the future. It will also make sure that the health needs
of the working-age population are attended to, to make sure that they
continue to work, earn, and pay taxes. It will also provide
palliative care to the retirees, to keep up the morale, but certainly
nothing as lavish as what is available to them now. Since their
tax-paying potential is negligible, keeping them alive as long as
possible is not a priority from a tax revenue maximization
perspective.

Not being specialists in the medical
field, but realizing that basic and preventive care have the highest
health care ROI and specialist care the lowest, the IRS would
probably want to dramatically simplify health care delivery. Huge hospitals and medical centers, with their teams of
specialists, support staff, swarms of administrators,
billing departments, medical labs, intensive care units and MRI machines, are too complex
for the IRS to even audit, never mind administer effectively. It is
far simpler to establish neighborhood clinics, and to provide them
with a fixed fee per patient per year, to spend in line with the
overall mandate.

Provisions would be made for some
number of specialists, probably shared between clinics, but with the
understanding that, from a tax revenue perspective, specialist care
reaches diminishing returns rather quickly. For instance, a triple
coronary bypass is hard to justify financially, because the patient's earning potential,
even after a full recovery, usually does not cover the cost of the operation.

Also, the IRS might consider actually
denying health care to rich people (those with net worth over $5
million) in order for the treasury to reap the windfall from estate taxes when they die. Such people (Mitt Romney is a good
example) rarely pay their fair share of tax in any case, being able
to hire accountants and lawyers, who exploit every possible loophole. And so, there shouldn't be any free heart
transplants for Dick or free brain transplants for George.

Having the health care system
administered by the Internal Revenue Service may seem rather inhumane to you.
However, I hope I have succeeded in pointing out that doing so would still work better
than ObamaCare. This health care system is so bad that improving it
is not any sort of challenge at all: I submit to you that even the
IRS would do a better job of it.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Why is that
reasonably rational individuals who are able to follow an argument
and who are unable to refute it are at the same time incapable of
making the transition from thought to action? What is stopping them?
Humans are clearly smarter than yeast, what does that matter if they
are incapable of acting any more intelligently?

As I promised, I will attempt to
address this question in this one, helped by all the comments I have
received. Ugo Bardi was quick to contribute this:

People just don't
care about understanding what's going on and what's going to happen.
If they are rich they care about how to make money on oil; if they
are poor they care about miracle devices that will save us from the
brink of the cliff. Then, as we start falling, interest in
understanding what's going to happen will fade even more.

The gist of
Dilworth's book is that we are smart, individually, but that we
aren't collectively. So, we are very good at solving individual
problems, but that has the cost of creating larger collective
problems which, then, we can't solve.

Dilworth's own summary of his book
contains this:

We are destroying
our natural environment at a constantly increasing pace, and in so
doing undermining the preconditions of our own existence. Why is this
so? This book reveals that our ecologically disruptive behaviour is
in fact rooted in our very nature as a species. Drawing on evolution
theory, biology, anthropology, archaeology, economics, environmental
science and history, this book explains the ecological predicament of
humankind by placing it in the context of the first scientific theory
of our species' development, taking over where Darwin left off. The
theory presented is applied in detail to the whole of our
seven-million-year history.

This provides me with as good a jumping-off
point as any, so let me begin.

Friday, March 09, 2012

In this 300th C-Realm Podcast episode, KMO welcomes Dmitry Orlov
back to the program to check in on the collapse narrative and to
compare the actual unfolding of events with Dmitry’s perspective of five
years ago.

"...I did an episode a few months back with—Guy McPherson was on, and Kurt Cobb, and Henry Warwick. And Henry was saying that it's just really irresponsible to talk about collapse to audiences who don't understand the very specific meaning of the word you have in mind, because generally when people hear "collapse," they think 'Mad Max Scenario', when in fact a collapse in the Joseph Tainter sense can be advantageous, you know, in fact it could be that we are due for some financial, political and commercial collapse, but social and cultural collapse are things you would want to avoid at all costs."

"Well, yes, it's not all one thing. The criticism that I use this word, well, you know, let them propose a different word. I haven't exactly redefined what I'm talking about, I'm just adding detail. So I don't know if that's entirely valid."

Monday, March 05, 2012

[Update: This post used to be about non-renewable natural resource scarcity, but things didn't go as planned. Now it's mostly about turning the heads on a small boat into a steam room/sauna, and that's just fine. See the comments for details.]

[This is a guest post from Chris, who has been looking into nonrenewable resource depletion for some time now. His conclusion is that, even if oil weren't the immediate problem, we'd still be "running out of planet" for many commodities without which an industrial civilization will collapse.]

The prevailing perception among the American public is that the hard times we are currently experiencing are temporary, that their leaders are implementing the proper mix of economic and political fixes, and that life will be back to normal soon. While this perception is entirely understandable given their historical experience, it is also entirely wrong. There will be no recovery this time.

[The ungrateful author didn't like my edits (his manuscript, as submitted, was a bit woolly) so I am taking down the text and leaving the graphics, which tell the story just fine even without the text. For more on this topic, read Richard Heinberg'sPeak Everything.]